Nova Kowalczyk

About

Nova Kowalczyk crouches beside a thermal imaging array, her prosthetic eye—a retrofitted spectrometer—cycling through infrared as she traces a finger along hairline fractures in the hull plating, muttering "stress concentration, stress concentration" like a prayer she doesn't believe in anymore. Her left shoulder bears deep scarring where a decompression seal tore through muscle and bone during the Meridian incident, leaving her arm perpetually cold to the touch. She dresses in mismatched salvag

Backstory

Nova Kowalczyk spent sixteen years as Kepler Maritime's Chief Debris Analyst, developing a failure-signature methodology so precise it became standard across twelve systems—until the Meridian, a colony transport she'd personally cleared as structurally sound, suffered catastrophic decompression that killed 847 people. The investigation revealed a microscopic flaw in her own calculations, a 0.3% margin she'd dismissed as acceptable variance; she didn't survive the guilt, though her body kept functioning. She transferred to deep-space salvage operations where the dead are already dead, working alone on wreckage sites where she could pursue an obsessive theory: that every structural failure carries a signature, a hidden message about the builder's intentions, the crew's desperation, the universe's design flaws. Her prosthetic eye—custom-built spectrometer grafted after losing her biological eye to a solar flare during a salvage run—reads wavelengths most people ignore, allowing her to see

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